Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"I knocked earlier," the boy added when she opened the shutters. The sky over the red-and-yellow city's parapets was dimming, all the bells of its churches speaking their incomprehensible rounds.

The smell of charred timber hung heavy in the air. Farther along the gallery some of the men who lived up there, a tailor and a shoemaker and a man who sold fish off a barrow in the street, played pitnak while their wives talked and sewed. Gil scratched at her heavy mane of unbraided hair. "It's okay." She still felt queasy, and wondered a little at her own exhaustion. "What can I do for you?" The boy's pixie face twisted in an odd expression, and he hold out a broken curve of potsherd, such as shopkeepers toted up their addition on, or sent notes to one another, provided they could write. "Ingold, he asked me to give you this." It said: Gil -

Forgive me. It was necessary for me to flee, at once. How they knew l was here I do not know for certain, though Hegda may have seen more in me than she said and passed it on to them to spare herself more pain. Stay off the streets as much as you can, and guard yourself. I am safe. Only wait.

"He's left you." Niniak's voice was neutral, dead, but she couId tell the boy was furiously angry.

She shook her head. "He's just had to go into hiding. It sounds like he saw someone in the crowd..."

"Or he saw you had your back turned." The pale silver eyes glittered with old memory, old rage. "Like just 'cause you're ugly and got a scar and all, you aren't a hundred times better than all them stupid girls that flounce around the street after turn. What an idiot!"

Gil realized, with some surprise, that the boy had a crush on her. She hid a smile at this piece of consciousness-raising and said, "No. Ingold has enemies..." Niniak held out a second potsherd. "He said give you this three days from now, if he wasn't back." Gil went cold to her heart.

Forgive me. It is all that I can ask. Please, please understand. They hear with your ears. They see with your eyes. This I guessed, leaving the Keep-

but I also guessed that you would follow, against your own will, did I not bring you. It has been death in my heart daily, hourly, to do this to you. Without you at my side I stand some chance of reaching the cavern of the ice-mages before they realize I am on the mountain and rally the gaboogoos, the dooic, the mountain apes who because of the slunch are theirs to command-maybe even the armies of the warlords, for I cannot know now how far their power has reached. They knew of me through the minds of the Dark, in their dreaming, even as the Dark knew of them. As the Dark took my mind... Gil turned the sherd over; the writing was worse on the back... so the ice-mages saw. They know I am a danger, insofar as any can be. This may be my only chance.

As if she heard their voices in the distance, she felt the outcry of them, realizing they had been circumvented, tricked-realizing he was on his way. She felt them call out, drawing everything they could to them-gaboogoos, cave-apes, mutants. Readying themselves to crush him.

No, she thought, her heart screaming as she felt that frantic, furious call. NO! I love you, Gil. If I have not returned by this time, I will not return. I bless you, I free you. I only regret-and I regret with all my heart-that I cannot see you safe again to the Keep. But I cannot be two men. I fear that with you, I have not even been one. Please understand, as a warrior understands. Please do not despise me for what I had to do.

If I have not returned, it is because I met my death at the hands of the ice-mages; and I met it with your name on my lips. With all that is in me -Inglorion

Cold jerked Rudy awake. Cold and pain, an overwhelming wrenching breathlessness. Then a sense of shock that he knew instantly was secondhand but was clear as a scream in his mind. Ingold! he thought, staring into the blackness of his cell, knowing immediately the source. Ingold...!

The feeling didn't fade, but grew. Dizziness, the swimming dots of fire that merged into a single, terrible light; the numbing of his left arm; the hammerblow of pain over his heart. Ingold!

Rudy's mind fumbled, disoriented, with his sense of time. He'd fallen asleep in a tangle of old books and Gil's notes after more vain hours of searching for the answers he knew had to be somewhere: to time and stasis, to the power that had come to him at call, the power he had never felt before.

He wasn't as good as Ingold yet at knowing immediately where the stars were at any moment of the day or night, but reaching out with his senses, he heard nothing in the watchroom of the Guards but the desultory click of the single worn set of pitnak tiles, and from their barracks only the soft draw of sleepers' breath. The cold, the pain, the breathlessness, were already pouring away like smoke into a hole in darkness. Rudy fumbled with trembling hands under his pillow for his crystal, body aching from the aftershock. Christ, don't do this to me, man! The witchlight he summoned flared in the crystal's heart. Answer me! Tell me it ain't so... Nothing. The thick grayness of the ice-mages' malice seemed to choke the air. God damn it, God damn it, answer me! He lowered his hands, the witchlight fading. No. No.

Don't make me be the only wizard in this godforsaken world! Don't make me have to go after the ice-mages myself. I'm not any good at this, dammit! Pain. Breathlessness. Dizziness. Pain.

He couldn't sort them easily in his mind, but he knew it was Ingold's pain he'd felt. Knew it as surely as if he'd heard the old man's voice.

It's three o'clock in the Christly morning! Rudy wanted to scream. What the hell are you doing fighting monsters at three in the morning?

If Ingold were no longer alive, thought Rudy, he'd be able to see Gil even if she were with him...

But even that he could not do.

He can't be dead, he thought, whispering it to himself like a mantra, willing it to be true. He can't be dead. It was an endless time until dawn.

Accompanied by Janus, Melantrys, and the Icefalcon, he left the Keep as soon as the Doors were opened, climbed to the high ground near the orchards, where the slunch was less, and drew a power-circle, Summoning to himself every scrap and whisper of magic to be had from the earth, from the streams, from the dawn-fading stars. But whether Ingold was dead and Gil in some place where the influence of the ice-mages lay too thick to pierce, or whether Ingold lived and Gil were with him, he could get no shadow of either of them in his scrying stone's heart. Head aching from the exertion, he tried to contact Thoth, but all that appeared in the amethyst's facets were dim images of flabby, death-colored fungoid parodies of human and animal life crawling out of a wasteland of slunch to attack the patched, rambling pile of the Black Rock Keep.

Even that view was distant. He thought he could see men with weapons around the walls of black and gray stone, and brushwood stacked before the battered iron doors and along the north wall where the wizards had their little beehive hermitages, but he could not be sure.

Cold wind blew down on his back, and behind him he heard a swift scuffle, a slithering and then the heavy chunk, like someone hitting a watermelon with an ax. Blood- smell stung his nostrils as he turned.

"Better get back." The Icefalcon struck his ax into the earth to clean it. Whatever had come out of the slunch-decayed woods to attack lay in bleeding pieces at his feet.

"There's more on the way. See anything?"

Rudy shook his head despairingly. Gaunt and tired, Janus and Melantrys were closing around them. At the foot of the slope the woods were thick with slunch, hanging in dirty mats and clumps from the branches of the dying trees. Something was moving deep in the infected glades, and Rudy shoved the crystal into the pocket of his vest and headed for the Keep. Fast.